The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 93
Enselmo had grown up in Chiapas, a scrappy cartel street soldier with ambition and focus. Enrique’s father had been the governor of Coahuila when he was a boy, and he’d excelled in his studies at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. After graduation, he’d gone to work at the Vietnamese embassy in Mexico City and was instrumental in arranging for Premiere Phạm Văn Đồng’s visit to the country in the late ’70s. Enrique had once had a future.
But sometime in the next decade, Enrique had disappeared into the “Golden Triangle.” Rumors said he was working for Khun Sa, the notorious warlord who had proclaimed himself “King of the Golden Triangle.” Dale was skeptical of this story.
“I don’t know where he was,” Dale told me once, “but wherever it was, whatever he did, it fucked him up.”
My grandmother believed that he was a recovering addict, that he summoned his craving for heroin and channeled it into the rage he needed to make his kills. I asked Dale if he thought that could be true. “It makes sense,” he’d said. “Enrique is always in control. Always. As if he’s afraid if he slips even the slightest bit, he’ll lose everything. Like David Banner trying to contain the Hulk.”
I knew Enrique was a cold-blooded killer. The DEA wanted him for multiple murders and a ton of other offenses, but it was hard to reconcile his reputation with the man beside me, smoking contemplatively and flirting with Esperanza as she transferred trays of food from her old van to the kitchen in the casa.
Esperanza saw me and waved as she picked up yet another tray of her sweet tamales. I waved back fondly. I was glad she was making bank from this gig. Esperanza was a terrible gossip — a trait my grandmother shared — and I knew that she would give me the benefit of any “intel” she gathered while working the party. Her insights were sharp and unaffected by the amount of money Enselmo and the others threw around.
“Do you need any help?” Enrique asked suddenly as he ditched his cigarette and reached for the large tray in Esperanza’s hands. Dimples flashed as she surrendered it demurely.
“Gracias, Enrique.” Her smile took twenty years of worry and care off her face. I noticed Enrique’s besotted expression as he followed Esperanza into the kitchen.
I sighed inwardly. Esperanza had the worst taste in men.
I finished my cigarette and went back inside as well.
I passed one of Enselmo’s business associates, a small, dark-eyed American who seemed to have a permanent sneer on his face as he nursed what looked like a soda. I had to approve his choice of beverage. Mexican Cokes are way better than the American kind because they still use sugar down here instead of corn syrup. It was interesting though, that he wasn’t drinking. I filed that bit of information away in case I needed it later.
I eavesdropped on a couple of narco wives complaining about the price of tuition at the private school their children attended in Guadalajara, and moved on to listen to another conversation about the benefits of a night nanny versus other kinds of live-in help. One woman, not to be outdone, announced that she’d hired a governess who was teaching her children to speak Mandarin. The other women were not as impressed as she’d obviously hoped they would be.
I saw Dave Gomez standing slightly outside a circle of men talking intently about something. He looked desperate to join in, but they were all ignoring him, as was his wife, a thin, chic woman who looked bored as she listened to one of Enselmo’s business associates chatter on.
Dave had grown from a mean little boy into an unlikable man. His wife was from Mexico City and spent as much time there as possible, leaving Dave alone in Sangre de Cristo. I often wondered what her story was, and how she’d ended up with him. Maybe there were sides to Dave I’d never seen. Maybe it was a love match.
I saw Fernando Estevez—no relation to Steve—standing over the buffet table, piling his plate with fresh camarones and glowering at the crowd. Nearly everyone in town had been invited to this little fiesta, but his presence still surprised me. Nando had left town after the events we called la Noche de Sangre y Fuego, the night of blood and fire, when his brother-in-law had been killed, along with the chief of police and a couple of other cops. I knew that Enselmo Porras had been one of the people who’d conspired in the murders, though his hand had not swung the machete.
It was not a good thing that Nando was here with his anger and his suspicions. The atmosphere was already a potent mix of incendiary emotions; it wouldn’t take much of a spark to set it off.
I kept moving but paused at the entrance to what was obviously Enselmo’s man cave. It reeked of old cigar smoke and was dominated by a massive oil portrait of Enselmo himself, dressed to impress in a dark blue suit and power tie. I knew the moment I saw the portrait that it was no ordinary painting, but rather a cage for his soul. I looked at the artist’s signature and was not surprised to see it was Rosamara Quintana.
I wondered what Enselmo had done to piss her off. Somehow the Spider had captured “El Tiburon’s” soul the same way she’d captured Dale’s. I wondered if there was another painting somewhere that had Dale trapped in it like a Night Gallery episode.
I looked back at the portrait of Enselmo. The expression on his face was composed, but his eyes were screaming, Ayuadame!
“A good likeness, no?” I turned to see a hatchet-faced Anglo I’d never met before. He nodded his head at me. “Jonah Biden,” he said. “No relation to Joe.”
I nodded, wondering who he was. Another of Enselmo’s business partners? Another of the undercover DEA agents Dale had worked with?
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he added, and that got my attention, but before I could frame a question, he’d knocked back four fingers of Barrique de Ponciano Porfidio like it was watered-down lemonade and walked away.
Right then Enselmo finally made his entrance, Rosamara Quintana on his arm. His face was blank, but he moved naturally, giving no sign that he was actually under her control like a flesh puppet in a horror movie.
Rosamara looked even younger and more beautiful than the first time I had seen her more than twenty years before. Casting spells to remain ageless is dark magic because it goes against the natural laws. That meant Rosamara had built up a lot of bad karma over the years. Good, I thought. That might give me some advantage. I knew I would need it.
She was small but had the presence of an Amazon. For the party, she had piled her dark hair in a complicated Frida-style braid on her head that left her neck bare to display a collar of rubies the size of thumbnails and the exact color of arterial blood. She wore Leelee’s ruby ring on the forefinger of her right hand. The gems matched her aura.
Everyone in the room felt the power that had entered the room with her. Some even flinched away or showed their uneasiness by gulping their drinks. Not me. I met her eyes as she passed me, endured the predator’s smile she bestowed on me without shuddering.
Te va a doler, I thought. Bring it bitch, and I will hurt you.
Even to myself, that sounded like false bravado. I went in search of another tequila and tonic.
13
The Best-Laid Plans
In my desire to rescue Dale from whatever hell Rosamara had consigned him to, I hadn’t really planned things out very well. As I looked at my spectacular adversary, I realized I needed to rethink my strategy. My first thought had been to corner her at some point and then….
Then I really didn’t know what I was planning to do, just that I wanted to free Dale’s soul. I was pretty sure just asking her politely wasn’t going to work. I was pretty sure she’d only laugh if I tried threats. I felt utterly foolish now that I was actually in her presence.
Abandoning Dale was not an option, though. I am coming for you, I thought, though hell should bar the way.
The evening wore on. Petra circled with her tray of mixed drinks while scantily clad “bottle girls” poured shots for the serious drinkers. The lavish buffet spread was replenished so often that I almost wanted to grab a prawn just to see how fast it would be replaced.
I was constantly aware of Rosamara’s eyes on me, but every instinct I had told me to stay out of her reach, that this was neither the time nor the place for the confrontation I had originally and so hastily envisioned.
I had nothing to bargain with and everything to lose.
And yet, even as I backed off on my own plan, I could tell that something bad was going to happen at the party — violence was in the air like ozone before a thunderstorm.
I knew something bad was going to happen, but when it did, I was looking in the wrong direction.
The casa had a huge pool in the back, and when Enselmo had moved in, he’d had the chlorinated water drained and replaced with saltwater. Then he’d turned the pool into an aquarium for a six-foot baby great white shark. All the guests were fascinated by the shark, edging close to the pool to get a good look. At various intervals, one or another of Enselmo’s people would throw a bucket of fish into the water so everyone could see what a one-shark feeding frenzy looked like up close.
“Better than Shark Week,” I heard Jonah say to Erminita, who was watching the activity with rapt attention.
I felt sick to my stomach. One of the first times Dale had stayed over, I’d awakened in the night to find him out on my little porch, staring at the sky and shaking in the cold. “Come back to bed,” I’d coaxed him.
“I can’t sleep.”
I’d gone back inside the house and brought out a blanket and two bottles of beer, handed him one of the beers, and said, “Tell me.”
The story hadn’t been pretty.
He had been undercover in El Paso, working with a confidential informant he called “Jimichanga.”
“He was a squirrelly little guy,” Dale told me. “Loved to dance. I mean…loved it. He was always posting videos to YouTube and shit.”
“Was he any good?”
“Yeah, he was.”
What Jimichanga was not good at was keeping his mouth shut, and it didn’t take very long before the guy he worked for, the guy Dale was investigating, found out that the squirrelly little guy was spilling his guts to the cops. So the guy invited everyone working for him over for a big barbecue on a ranch he had outside of town. And Dale was there because he was posing as a money launderer who was cleaning the guy’s money through a bunch of low-rent movie theaters.
“And this guy had a big water tank — in-ground tank to water his stock. It was huge, the size of a small lake. It was just part of the landscape, so nobody was paying any attention to it.
“People were too busy drinking and drugging and just having a good time. And Jimi? He was right there in the middle of it, joking with his boss, flirting with the wives. Like nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Dale had drained his beer and sat quietly for a minute before he continued. I tucked my end of the blanket tighter around my shoulders. I was freezing cold and not just from the frigid night air.
“And then right after they started serving up the meat, that crazy drug dealer stabbed Jimi with the carving knife and threw him into the tank. He was bleeding and screaming and that was even before he saw the shark.”
“The guy literally had a shark tank on his property?”
“Yeah, he was going for full-on super-villain.”
I shook my head, already imagining the hapless Jimi’s fate.
“There was so much blood in the water, you can’t imagine,” Dale said, “so Jimi was a goner no matter what. He’d have bled out in minutes. But as soon as he hit the water, the shark grabbed him.”
His eyes darkened as he recounted the memory. “Some of the guests made bets on how long it would take for the shark to rip him to shreds.”
“There was nothing you could have done to save him,” I’d said, because I felt I had to say something.
“No shit,” he’d said.
“I’ll get you another beer,” I said. In the kitchen I opened a fresh beer and drank off the first two inches. Then I threw in a powder my grandmother had taught me to make, something I always kept close to hand. Then I spoke a spell of forgetting.
I told him there was something in the beer that would help him go back to sleep, and he’d trusted me enough, even then, to drink the beer, although he said it was bitter.
The next day the memory of that horror show he had witnessed was more like a half-remembered dream. Within a week, he no longer remembered it at all.
But I hadn’t forgotten, so seeing that shark in Enselmo’s pool made me uneasy as hell. And another thing that made me uneasy was realizing that apparently I was the only one who could see Jonah Biden as he slipped through the crowd like a shadow. I saw people turn as if they’d felt a presence pass, only to look puzzled when they saw nothing was there.
I tried to keep him in my sight, but it wasn’t easy.
Until he showed up at my elbow as I stood at the buffet table, pretending to fill my plate.
“Aixa, a word with you?” He touched my arm, and his fingers left a mark on my skin for just a moment.
I went cold, as if a cockroach had scuttled across my heart.
“What?” I said.
“You need to leave now,” he said.
But his order, his warning, came far too late.
By then, Enselmo Porras had walked up to a microphone set up before the grand fireplace in the living room, Rosamara by his side like Lady Macbeth. He’d tapped the mic to get everyone’s attention. And when all eyes were on him, waiting for whatever he was going to say, Rosamara Quintana pulled a gold-plated gun out of her purse and shot him between the eyes.
14
Family Matters
All hell broke loose after that. As if the shot had been a signal, Elvis and the other thugs pulled out their own weapons and started shooting at Rosamara. But she was no longer there and the bullets went flying in every direction, hitting locals and narcos alike.
Is this a coup, I wondered. Is someone cleaning house?
I saw the police chief go down, and the mayor, and Erminita too, who was shot in her ample ass as she crawled under a table. I threw out a hasty spell of protection in her direction and then realized there was another shield being raised. I turned and saw Jonah standing in the middle of the room, white light radiating from his hands. I could feel that light settling over me, swaddling me in safety.
People were screaming, running for the doors. I saw Petra cowering in a corner, holding the silver drinks tray over her head as if it would protect her like Wonder Woman’s shield.
I looked around, but I didn’t see Rosamara. That didn’t surprise me. Spiders have a way of hiding from the light. She could have killed Enselmo quietly with a bit of magic, but she’d chosen to do it loud and splashy. She was sending a message, but I couldn’t decode it. And I couldn’t figure out who the message was for.
And then the shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and a horrible silence descended as the survivors choked on air filled with smoke and the smell of blood.
Tonio Cruz, who should have been promoted to the job of police chief after Jorge Pinero was murdered, went looking for a phone as other guests fled from the scene, practically running over the valet stand to grab their keys.
The three “associates” who’d been the guests of honor quietly disappeared, their chauffeurs bundling them into their big luxury cars and driving off without a backward glance.
I caught a glimpse of Esperanza’s horrified face and shooed her back into the kitchen.
“Have you been paid?” I asked her.
She nodded mutely.
“Then leave the rest of the food and go,” I said. “When the cops come, they’ll be hungry.”
“But who’s going to clean up?” she protested.
“Leave it,” I said. “Someone will clean it up.”
She still looked uncertain, but I gave her a little shove. “Go on,” I said gently. “This is no place for you to be.”
She hugged me quickly and kissed me on the cheek. “You either,” she said, but she left.
The first cop to arrive was Charlie Izquierdo, and the first person he went up to was Enrique Riquelme. His manner was respectful but no-nonsense. That gave me hope that he wasn’t in the narcos’ pocket like the now-deceased Chief of Police had been.
I didn’t see Jonah anywhere, but it was hard to tell with everyone milling around in an adrenaline-fueled panic.
Elvis, meanwhile, was rapidly melting down.
“Her purse was empty,” he kept saying to anyone who would listen. “Where did she get the gun? Out of her chocha?”
Charlie wasn’t paying any attention to him, so I went over to the bar and poured Elvis a shot of his dead patron’s pricey tequila and handed it to him. “Me cago en Dios,” he said as he tossed off the shot. Then he added in English, “Fuck me.” He held out his glass, so I poured him another shot. He drank it and then looked at me with eyes that were tearing up. “I’m just a bodyguard, Aixa. I’ve never killed anybody before.”
There’s a first time for everything, I thought grimly, but I kept the thought to myself.
“Oh, God, I’m going to hell for this,” he said, and buried his head in his hands and started weeping.
It was a little hard to feel sympathetic for the man; it wasn’t as if he was working for Doctors Without Borders. I had intended to ask him about Rosamara, but Lorenzo Torres, who had become the narcos’ go-to lawyer since they hit town, materialized at the bar, smelling like tequila and Acqua di Gio.
“Disculpe me,” he said over his shoulder as he dragged the young thug away without an apology to him.
Then I did almost feel sorry for Elvis.
I saw Charlie and Tonio huddling by the door with Enrique as more guests took their leave. Elvis was led away in handcuffs, and Lorenzo went with him. Eventually, the only people left in the living room were Enrique, Tonio, and me.
I was on my way out as well when Tonio stopped me.
